jenk: Faye (GeekGirl)
[personal profile] jenk
Ok, this year took longer than usual. Partly because I kept putting it off. Partly because the threads weren't coming together.

The below is mostly for my reference, so I will use an

Timeline:
Monday
I checked what we had and didn't have and made piles by category. I caught that the mortgage interest info had probably been pitched as junk mail. (We were also missing some investment info, which I did not catch; TurboTax did on my second pass through. But I'm getting ahead of myself.)

Tuesday day
I looked up the mortgage company info.

Tuesday night
I did a rough cut of the 1040 + A, B, & C. Got initial refund estimate.

Wednesday day
I double-checked the sales tax deduction (IRS.gov has a calculator, w00t), schedule C, and schedule SE. (Small freelance gig.)

Wednesday night
I started shoving it all into TurboTax. I expected TT to come up with a few deductions/credits I'd missed, and it did - specifically the foreign tax credit (only $18, but oh well). What I didn't expect was that it would find income I'd missed when it imported our Vanguard info. Spent time time chasing down that yes, that really was our income and that yes, it really wasn't in the stack of paper I had (but it was on the website). This was probably my biggest derailment / delay to the entire process. Got a different refund estimate about twice as large as the first.

Today
I finished up, mostly dotting i's, crossing t's, finishing the blasted schedule D, and figuring out why TT calculated our tax differently from the vanilla tax tables. Final cash back is between the two previous estimates.

Things to remember next year:
  • All 1099s are on the Vanguard website by account. We have two accounts (my original and our joint account). This means two sets of 1099-Inv, 1099-Div, etc. Might want to just get it all off the web as PDF in one batch.
  • The mortgage info is on the mortgage company's website.
  • Have started a 2008 taxes envelope already with property tax info.
  • Also remember to carry forward capital lossage next year.
  • Some mutual funds pay qualified dividends. This means mildly fancy tax calculations - do not just jump directly to the tax tables.
  • We are now done with Citi Smith Barney and most of the other individual stocks. Yay!!!! Less to report and track!!!
  • ...and speaking of tracking - I did have the cost basis for all the stocks / mutual funds sold. Compared to my first experiences with selling employee purchase plan stock, this is seriously rockin' of me. W00t.
As an aside for anyone reading this...we expected to get money back. Philosophically I'd rather pay a little at tax time rather than loan cash to the government all year, but I accept that with the investments et al we have enough uncertainty about how much our taxes will be that it's better to overpay than underpay. So I changed my W-4 accordingly.
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